Chichester Copywriter sits before Cleopatra

Katy of Chichester Copywriter is thrilled to be going to Chichester Festival Theatre to watch a performance of Antony and Cleopatra starring Kim Cattrall at the end of September. This is very exciting for our West Sussex copywriter for two reasons:

Katy loves Shakespeare and while she has already seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, A Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Merchant of Venice, she is yet to see Antony and Cleopatra on the stage.

SATC is one of Katy’s all-time favourite TV shows, which starred Kim Cattrall as racy PR professional Samantha Jones. In fact, Carrie Bradshaw, the show’s lead who was a successful columnist and author, is one of Katy’s professional idols – despite the fact that she’s a fictional character, of course.

In anticipation of seeing Antony and Cleopatra, this week Katy went along to a pre-show talk where author Kate Mosse interviewed Janet Suzman on her direction of the play as well as her new book Not Hamlet: Meditations on the Frail Position of Women in Drama.

This revealed that Janet is not only directing the play but she has previously played the part of Cleopatra herself. Janet talked about how interesting it was to bring the play to Chichester’s uniquely shaped stage, which means that entrances and exits have to be even more creative.

The British actress and director also talked about how when staging a Shakespearean play it’s sometimes necessary to change the original text a little and while purists may tut (or avert their eyes at this point) this can actually help the flow of the performance. The reason for this is that a modern audience can become distracted if a performance contains too many words or a splattering of unfamiliar words. This was fascinating to Katy as a professional copywriter who is tasked with the choice of exact words and tone to suit each and every brand and target audience that she writes for.

You’ll, however, understand that the most exhilarating part of the evening was that once Katy was seated in-between her mum and friend Diana, someone rather special came to perch behind them and listen to Janet’s talk with Kate Mosse. Yes, none other than Kim Cattrall snuck into the next row and radiated fabulousness while her director delivered a witty and insightful interview. Needless to say, our creative copywriter was a little bit star-struck! What’s more, Katy’s relieved that she was in front of Cleopatra and not her beau, who knows what Antony would do left with a sword in hand?

About me

Hello, my name is Katy Lassetter and I have more than 8 years experience as a copywriter. I dabbled with the pen from an early age but first seriously entertained the notion of professional copywriting while studying Communication at Bournemouth University...